The Publications Review Board is the CIA office that must clear anything a current or former officer publishes. John Kiriakou describes the obligation as total: “Anytime I write something, whether it’s a book or an article or a letter to the editor of Home and Garden magazine, I have to send that to the CIA’s Publications Review Board, and they have to clear it.”[1]
Turnaround as a measure of standing
In the ordinary case the process is fast — “90% of the time, they’ll clear it in a couple of hours,” and a longer article might take 24 hours.[1]
Books are where the difference showed. Of his first: “when I was on the outs and everybody at the CIA in the leadership hated me, it took me nine months to write my first book and 22 months to get it cleared.” By contrast, his most recent six books “cleared in a matter of days.”[2]
Why they cannot stop him now
Kiriakou gives two reasons the board has little purchase on his current work. The first is age and access: much of what he discusses “is either ancient history, because I left the CIA 21 years ago, or it is based on open-source information.” He is entitled to his own positions and analysis, and “I don’t have access to classified information. And so they can’t stop me from saying something.”[2][3]
The second is statutory. There is a mandatory declassification rule — “it’s 35 years that something has to be declassified after 35 years” — unless a compelling national security reason applies. The exceptions he lists are material revealing sources and methods, material identifying a source, or anything touching the NSA. “Otherwise, we can do what we want.”[3][4]
Why the books are the licence
Asked what actually restricts him when audiences want stories, Kiriakou gave the clearance process as the answer rather than his own discretion. He does not want to go back to prison, he said — “but over the years because I’ve written so many books, I’ve written now nine books, I’ve gotten all my stories cleared.”[5] The published record, in other words, is the permission slip: material that has been through the Publications Review Board once can be told again from a stage.
The same mechanism supplies his answer to a question he is asked often, and which he refuses: whether he can tell a story he has never told before. He cannot, and the reason is not discretion but the shape of the clearance process — “the reason that I repeat many of the stories that I tell is because those are the stories that have been declassified.”[6] He describes the loop that produces them: he writes a book, sends it to the CIA for clearance, and the board blacks out what it considers classified; he then contests particular redactions on stated grounds, “sometimes I win, sometimes I lose.” Whatever finally survives, he has already told. “Everything that they’ve finally approved I’ve already told.”[7]
He names two further releases beside it. The first is time — the CIA is subject to “something called the mandatory declassification”, under which information has to be declassified when it reaches the thirty- or thirty-five-year mark, though as a rule someone must file a Freedom of Information Act request to force it.[5][8] The second is the category distinction he relies on most in commentary: “my opinion is not classified so long as it’s not based on specifically classified information.”[8]
None of which, he concedes, empties the vault. Asked directly whether there are things he knows and still cannot say, he agreed there are, and how bad they are drew four words: “it’s it’s pretty ugly.”[8]
Source note: this account was given in the Zeteo interview of 10 June 2026 and survives in two records of it. The auto-captions of the Zeteo upload drop the sentence about the nine books, which is preserved only in a third-party reaction upload of the same interview; each half is cited to the record that carries it.
The Devlin evasion
Kiriakou cites one route around the board that he says worked, and that he admires without having attempted. The former chief of station in the Congo, Larry Devlin, wrote a full career memoir and instructed his daughter to publish it the day after he died. “And that’s what she did. And they never went to the Publications Review Board.” Kiriakou’s verdict is “well played” — with the observation that the secrecy agreements have presumably been tightened since, “at least if the lawyers are worth anything.”[9][10]
The NSA hold on the surveillance book
Kiriakou describes a late objection he treats as possible retaliation. The board had cleared all three of the CIA Insider’s Guide volumes due out together, and then he received an email saying that although the surveillance and surveillance-detection title had been cleared, “there’s another governmental entity that wants to review it, because they may have an objection.”[11][12]
His written answer was that he had “never signed any secrecy agreements with any other federal government entity. If you guys cleared it, then it’s cleared, and it’s going to be published.” The board then telephoned him — “which they’re not supposed to do, because everything is supposed to be in writing so we can prove our side in court.”[13][14]
On the call he asked directly: “look, at least be honest and tell me — was this the FBI harassing me? And the guy said, no, it was NSA. I said, why in the world would NSA care about a book that talks about conducting surveillance or surveillance detection — you know, where you’re just driving around in a car following somebody, or driving around making sure that nobody is following you? And he said, I don’t know, but they said they need it until April 22nd.” Kiriakou’s own verdict is undecided: “I don’t know if that’s harassment or not.”[14][15]
Clearance as a defence against the agency itself
Kiriakou has described the board”s clearances doing double duty — not only permitting publication but defeating the agency”s own subsequent accusations. After 2007 the CIA filed a crimes report with the Justice Department after each of his op-eds, television interviews and campus speeches, alleging fresh leaks. “Each time the Justice Department determined that I did not leak any classified information. In fact, I would get those op-eds and those speeches cleared by the CIA”s Publications Review Board in advance.”[16]
What it covers, and for how long
Asked why a man no longer employed by the agency has to seek clearance at all, Kiriakou stated the obligation in full: “I have to get anything I write dealing with intelligence, CIA, foreign affairs, government — anything — for the rest of my life, cleared by the CIA’s publications review board.”[17]
Asked whether that extended to the interview he was giving, he drew the boundary precisely: the requirement covers “written products — articles, books, magazine articles, you know, op-eds.” Interviews are not covered. “Interviews are okay.”[17][18]
Clearance is not, however, a shield. His Los Angeles Times op-ed had gone through the board and been approved, and the agency’s office of security nonetheless summoned his wife over a sentence in it — the episode recorded at the Bolivian visa line.[19]
The false-statement count
Among the charges brought against Kiriakou was one count of making a false statement to the CIA’s Publications Review Board, arising from the process of writing his book. He calls the charge absurd.[20]
What he emphasises is that its content was never legible to him. He does not recall what the false statement was supposed to have been, and describes sitting in a conference room with his lawyers when they asked him what exactly it was — and being unable to tell them. He was supposed, he says, to have lied to the Board somehow.[20]
The two roads
Asked in February 2013 what message his prosecution sent, Kiriakou answered by contrasting the two manuscripts the same office receives.
“I think the message is: if you want to write a book saying how great the CIA is, how great government policy is, they’re going to help you get that book out. The Publications Review Board at the CIA will clear it quickly, and you’re welcome to go on your book tour. But if you blow the whistle, if you point out incidents of waste, fraud, abuse, any illegality, be prepared for a tough road.”
The bill he attaches to the second road is personal rather than legal: “you can expect the loss of your friends, the loss of your job, stability — in my case, the loss of my pension… your life is going to change dramatically.”[21][22]